Pot law chaos? That’s on Trudeau

[Beavis]

Recreational Medicinal it doesn't matter... Soon Recreational and Medical marijuana will be legal for all adults!!

Any current marijuana laws, and past charges that have ruined lives are completely unjust and should be reversed if its now going to be legal.. We are going to correct this great error we made for years trying and failing to prohibit marijuana well encouraging and allowing alcohol and tobacco which are far more harmful on users and the community..

I omitted the rest of the quote for brevity.

LiamHaddock - you and I are of the same ilk. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to voice your opinion in a mature manner, even in the face of some of these people spewing bizarre arguments at you. It really brightens my day to see sensible adults who truly see the big picture and aren't confined to the small little box many seem to have confined themselves to.

In my opinion, there is no honour in blindly following laws that were created only to benefit a few at the expense of the well being of the general public.

It is frustrating when people compare breaking marijuana laws with breaking other laws. It shows their lack of thinking outside the box. The most frustrating thing is they tend to give off the impression that they are more intelligent because they are smart enough to follow all laws blindly. I think we can all agree most laws serve the greater good. If there weren't laws and penalties to prevent people from murdering, speeding in vehicles, stealing from one another, etc., we would live in absolute chaos. Then, you have a sliding scale of other laws that become more trivial or subjective to circumstance.

Think about a 4-way intersection with stop signs. If you arrive in the middle of the night, approach this intersection, slow down, scan the area, verify there are no pedestrians or other vehicles, then roll through without stopping, that's technically illegal. But if you're a reasonable adult, you can see there is no harm done there. The real purpose of the stop signs is to establish a system of order for when there is traffic. In the absence of traffic, they are essentially moot. However, because we cannot trust ALL people to act responsibly and apply good judgement in all situations, it remains against the law to roll through that stop sign in the middle of the night with no one around. I agree that it's good practice to always stop just for the purpose of establishing the habit, but I hope you can see where I'm going with this.

Not every law makes sense in every situation. The laws that serve the well being of the public as well as reinforcing order to society make perfect sense to follow. However, arbitrary laws that were obviously put in place to benefit a few powerful heads of industry at the expense of the average citizen simply cannot be taken seriously by any reasonable person, in my opinion. There is great danger in setting precedent by idly following unjust protocols established by unscrupulous weasels. I will close this comment with a great quote by a brilliant author named Graham Hancock:

“The skeptics will say: well who cares whether we’re allowed to smoke cannabis or not, it’s just a trivial, recreational thing. But actually I think it’s a litmus test for the state of freedom in the society we live in. If that society supposes that it has a right to impose itself directly upon the consciousness of individual adults, and actually descend them to prison if they break the consciousness laws, then we have no kind of freedom at all. And we need to sort this issue of freedom out before we start going on about all the other issues of freedom that are, of course, of great importance as well.”

[Beavis]

The hardest thing to do will be to change attitudes amongst the those who believe the Refer Madness hype.
A dear friend still thinks the brain damage in a mutual friend was caused by weed not alcohol and she cannot be convinced.
If weed caused the same incidence of death from OD's as Fentanyl can you imagine the outcry!

No doubt, and it gets worse when you leave BC. I work in Alberta and it's painful to hear some of the comments people make about cannabis and cannabis users. It's evident that there is a lot of brainwashing and lack of effort to research the truth in a good chunk of the population here. Very disheartening at times. The repressive and antiquated system of using pre-employment drug testing that includes arbitrary marijuana use doesn't help matters. Thankfully that doesn't exist outside this little bubble.

[davis123]

It seems the people with the loudest voice about marijuana are the people who have no knowledge about it, recreational or medically. Maybe they had a few puffs when they were a teenager and they think they are knowledgeable. Which makes no sense whatsoever, if you people do not smoke it for recreation or medical what makes you think your opinion matters on the topic? You have no knowledge about it. Simple as that. If you have no knowledge = close your mouth and let the people with experience and scientific evidence do their job without your uneducated interference.

LOL, maybe the pot is affecting your ability to distinguish between legal medical pot use and illegal recreational pot use.
Your doing the medical pot users a disservice by promoting what is currently illegal recreational use in Canada and lumping the two together.

You are the exact type of person I was referring to in that statement above. You clearly have no knowledge how marijuana affects a long-term smoker, you make these snide little judgements about me, assuming I am somehow not mentally capable of distinguishing between something because I smoke marijuana. Are you really the type of person who thinks marijuana smokers' are idiots or too dense to understand things because the weed has wrecked their brain cells? lol ...EDUCATION is the answer to your problem, check it out.

There are thousands and thousands of people like me out there, I don't have a medical card for marijuana, I know I should certainly be eligible for one. But so many people have the same state of mind as you and it makes it very difficult to find a doctor who will agree that marijuana helps incredibly. So basically what I am saying here, is that people like you are the problem. Constantly giving your opinions on old, outdated, stereotypical shenanigans about marijuana. People like you are not helping anyone, and are the ones doing a disservice to everyone. Do you really think people like me are just going to sit back and wait for the Government to set things in motion, while our health deteriorates, when we KNOW what makes us better? Nope, we are not, we will buy it, we will smoke it, and we will feel a million times better medically and we don't give a flying crap what people like you think about it being illegal. Maybe open your mind and see that there are so many that are considered 'recreational' smokers who actually use it for medical purposes as well.

And anyone who does smoke it only for recreational reasons, have at it, who cares, it will be legal in no time :) It never should have been illegal in the first place. Stupid laws like this do not get changed unless people fight them, and that is exactly what has been in motion for years.

[dieseluphammerdown]

And anyone who does smoke it only for recreational reasons, have at it, who cares, it will be legal in no time :)
What\s no time? a week? a year? 5,or 10 years? sounds like pothead justification for braking the law to me.


It never should have been illegal in the first place. Says every pothead trying to justify their crutch.

Stupid laws like this do not get changed unless people fight them, and that is exactly what has been in motion for years.and what exactly have you done for this cause that seems so near and dear to your heart?

If what you say about it medically benefitting you is true then get a doctors prescription if it's so beneficial to your health needs, and in the mean time you are braking the law like it or not like every other recreational pothead out their.

[dieseluphammerdown]

Well it's seem's Justine is once again spitting on all his fellow potheads by shooting down decriminalizing pot.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government plans to introduce legislation to legalize marijuana next spring, but has no plans in the meantime to decriminalize the drug before a new regulatory regime replaces the existing laws

So how do all you recreational stoners feel now that you supported Justine and he wants to continue to treat you like criminals.?

[whatwhat]

So how do all you recreational stoners feel now that you supported Justin and he wants to continue to treat you like criminals.?

Well I'm not a "recreational stoner" so never feel treated like a criminal. But Trudeau never said he would first decriminalize pot and then legalize it, only that he would legalize it. So I am sure the majority of people who supported him during his election, and actually paid attention to his political polices, and can comprehend words knew this was the route that was going to happen.

[maryjane48]

the cons were never going to change the pot laws so it was still the right choice to elect jt .

[SmokeOnTheWater]

We will legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana.

https://www.liberal.ca/realchange/marijuana/

[jimmy4321]

They should NOT decriminalize it unless people want to wait another 30yrs for legalization.

[davis123]

It never should have been illegal in the first place.

Says every pothead trying to justify their crutch.

Actually, says every person that has bothered to educate themselves about marijuana. Canada can't even provide a reason it became illegal here, and in the U.S there was so much blatant corruption and ignorance.

I would love to see you read through the history of marijuana and the scientific studies that were completed and then come back and tell me that it should have been illegal, and provide your reasoning, with sources.

There are links at the bottom of this post, I dare you read them to educate yourself, I promise I won't tell you I told you so

In 1932, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws included an optional marihuana, provision in the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act, and by 1937 every state, either by adoption of the Uniform Act or by separate legislation, had prohibited marihuana use. In late 1937, the Congress adopted the Marihuana Tax Act, superimposing a, federal prohibitory scheme on the state scheme.

Not once during this entire period was any comprehensive scientific study undertaken in this country of marihuana, or its effects. The drug was assumed to be a 'narcotic' to render the user psychologically dependent, to provoke violent crime, and to cause insanity. Although media attention was attracted to marihuana use around 1935, public awareness was low and public debate non-existent. As long as use remained confined to insulated minorities throughout the next quarter century, the situation remained stable. When penalties for narcotics violations escalated in the 1950's, marihuana penalties went right along with them, until a first-offense possessor was a felon subject to lengthy incarceration.

Interestingly enough it was labeled as a Schedule 1 drug in the 70's, which means it had no medical use and a high potential of abuse, what tests did they use to come up with this conclusion?

Schedule I

Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. Schedule I drugs are the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence. Some examples of Schedule I drugs are:

heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), marijuana (cannabis), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone, and peyote

The Shafer Commission -- officially known as the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse -- took its job seriously. They launched fifty research projects, polled the public and members of the criminal justice community, and took thousands of pages of testimony. Their work is still the most comprehensive review of marijuana ever conducted by the federal government.

After reviewing all the evidence, these drug warriors were forced to come to a different conclusion than they had at first expected. Rather than harshly condemning marijuana, they started talking about legalization. When Nixon heard such talk, he quickly denounced the Commission -- months before it issued its report.

Some parties have argued that the aim of the Act was to reduce the size of the hemp industry [3][4][5] largely as an effort of businessmen Andrew Mellon, Randolph Hearst, and the Du Pont family.[3][5] With the invention of the decorticator, hemp became a very cheap substitute for the paper pulp that was used in the newspaper industry.[3][6] Hearst felt that this was a threat to his extensive timber holdings. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury and the wealthiest man in America, had invested heavily in the Du Pont families new synthetic fiber, nylon, which was also being outcompeted by hemp.[3] In Western Europe, nobody banned the cultivation of hemp in the 1930's but the commercial cultivation ceased almost anyhow in the decades after the 1930's. Hemp was simply ousted by artificial fibres.[7]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 35/?page=1
http://www.csdp.org/research/shafernixon.pdf
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/ ... _1937.html
http://www.drugpolicy.org/blog/how-did- ... irst-place
http://www.mapinc.org/newscsdp/v02/n520/a08.html
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Lib ... ncmenu.htm
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126236&page=1
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/marijuana ... -1.2630436
http://www.metronews.ca/news/canada/201 ... th-it.html

[Boda]

So how do all you recreational stoners feel now that you supported Justin and he wants to continue to treat you like criminals.?

It does seem the PM was a little over zealous claiming he would promptly legalize marijuana.
Probably more hoops to jump thru than anticipated?
But if you recreational drunks had any understanding of long term side affects and costs to society resulting from marijuana use versus the side affects and costs to society resulting from ingesting far more debilitating drugs such as alcohol, you may find the resulting conversation far more informative.

[JLives]

Why would legalization supporters be upset by Trudeau doing what he said he was going to do? Legislation is to be announced next Spring. Decriminalization is not a good idea because the market remains in the hands of criminal organizations. Trudeau understands this and that's why Canada is opting to legalize and regulate. I'm patient and understand laws of this magnitude take time to do properly.

[Atomoa]

The Liberals argue that it would create a "free for all". Is it not currently a free for all, except there is no tax being collected?

There would be absolutely no difference in availability. The only difference would be that currently the people who are unlucky enough to get caught are going to get charged and we as taxpayers are going to pay the police, courts and legal system to process these people. Literally paying to build a bridge to nowhere.

Justin Trudeau was lucky that when he was smoking pot he wasn't caught. The law is the law, so says he. If you're unlucky enough to get caught with it too bad for you, so says he.

[Grandan]

No doubt, and it gets worse when you leave BC. I work in Alberta and it's painful to hear some of the comments people make about cannabis and cannabis users. It's evident that there is a lot of brainwashing and lack of effort to research the truth in a good chunk of the population here. Very disheartening at times. The repressive and antiquated system of using pre-employment drug testing that includes arbitrary marijuana use doesn't help matters. Thankfully that doesn't exist outside this little bubble.

I know of a "security person" who's job it was to "manage" to keep drugs out of the workplace. His problem was personal cannabis consumption.

[Smurf]

Don't forget people that even if they legalise it as they say with restrictions, penalties etc. testing on job sites could still be legal and likely. You do get thrown off job sites for alcohol use.